I'm off to the WJF. Everyone better be there.

Posted by Vova at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

We're back home! Hope you guys liked the NBC thing we did. There's really a lot to it, and I don't want to talk about it right now. Maybe we'll make "The making of the today show appearance" video. But I'm not going into it now. Now I'd like to talk about smoking.

My sister posted on her blog I "smoked" her out of my room. Since then I got quite a few emails from some of you guys who are concerned about my "smoking habit". I don't happen to have a smoking habit. I don't smoke, nor do I drink or do any drugs. Although I do appreciate your concern, I must say I think people are generally unjust to smokers. People lecturing smokers on how horrible smoking is... I hear it a lot.
In some cases I can see why people would do that. But in most cases I think it's very condescending to do that. Smokers know about smoking being dangerous to them. They've made their choice based on information they have. Chances are they probably know more about smoking than non-smokers do. For better or worse, they decided to smoke. Why bother them about it? Do we walk up to people who buy a big mac and lecture them on how many calories it's got and how horrible it is for you? I think that's paternalistic. Just my thoughts.

Posted by Vova at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Hey guys. So yesterday sucked. I went to the Promenade to street perform and I did like 3 shows (from 8 to 8:45 pm) until it got so dark that I couldn't juggle anymore. It turned out there was a fire somewhere in Santa Monica and the street lights on the part of the Promenade I was at were out. So I ended up wasting like 2 hours of my time going there and back... That was upsetting. A couple of people who read the blog came to see my first few shows. Thanks for doing so, and sorry to people who came to see me after 8:45.

Olga and I also got haircuts yesterday. Though I just got one like a couple of weeks ago, everybody around here seemed to have felt that I needed a whole bunch of hair cut off again. So that's what happened. People seem to be surprisingly concerned about my hair, so I hope you guys all like it. I can't tell if it's good or not, but hey, I'd do me regardless of my hair. Nah, not really... I really can't tell if I would or not.

In this paragraph, I'd like to discuss spelling. In my opinion, the goal of typing/writing is communicating something, so as long as one's spelling is not so bad that I can't understand what they're trying to say, that usually doesn't bug me. So for example with only a few rare occasions, confusing their and they're doesn't impair my understanding of what people are trying to say, so I'm cool with that. However, if one takes that mistake to the next level and spells "tough - "tuff", that confuses me a little bit, and makes me take my time a figure out what the person meant. So that's mildly annoying. And now on to my favorite example of that mess up (really, the only reason why I started talking about this). One guy (I'm going to keep his name confidential) was talking about how he had low self-esteem and instead of typing "self-esteem" he typed "self of steam". Now how the hell did steam get into the picture?! That mess up cracked me up too much for me to be in any way annoyed by it. So the moral of the story is, if you're going to fuck up your spelling, fuck up in a really big and funny way.

Posted by Vova at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)

A few people who read the blog showed up to watch a few of my shows yesterday. Thanks for that. Come over tonight (8-11 pm) those of you who didn't come over last night. Or should I say yesterday night.

Anyway, Olga and I haven't juggled in forever, and we got to get ready to do some juggling live on NBC's The Today Show in front of 6 million people watching... outside (as if the 6 million people watching wasn't going to make it hard enough). That'll be interesting. We sure hope wind conditions will be appropriate for us to juggle, otherwise that could really screw us up. Oh, well, we're going to go juggle in the wind.

Posted by Vova at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

Hey guys, it looks like I'll be going to be street performing this weekend quite a bit. I'm going today. And I'll do 2 hours today (8 pm - 10 pm). I'm also going tomorrow (8 pm - 11 pm) and on Sunday (not sure about the times yet). Those of you who can check out my show should. It's a cool show and I do some pretty cool juggling in it.

Posted by Vova at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Hey, so I heard a few complaints about the black-on-red font being hard to read. Never really occurred to me it would be a problem. Seems fine for me to read. But both, my dad and Mark agree that black on red IS hard to read. So I guess we're changing that eventually, just not yet. There's some really cool stuff happening right now that we're all busy with. You guys will see what it is soon. So bear with us, Mark will fix the readability issue eventually. I hope it doesn't keep you from reading our blogs.

Posted by Vova at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Hey guys, it's been a crazy day. A lot of stuff going on, and it looks like there'll be a couple of cool surprises coming your way soon. I see some of you are interested in finding out when I'm going to street perform.

I try to perform from 8 to 11 pm every Saturday. The problem with that is I just kinda street perform, when I don't have anything going on, and sometimes things come up and I end up not performing certain Saturday, and I would hate for you guys to drive up from a ways away and not see what you want to see. That would suck... I'm not quite sure yet whether or not I'll be doing it this weekend or not, but it looks like I probably will. I will let you guys know more on whether I'm going or not this Saturday as time passes.
There's been so much going on, that I didn't even practice today. And I try VERY hard to practice every day. It's extremely hard to practice every day with no exceptions. Almost impossible. But I'm still getting better, so you guys should check me out at the WJF in a couple of weeks. Can't wait for that. Still haven't put together any of my routines though, which may be a good sign. Last year I had my routine prepared like 6 months in advance... and we all know how that worked out. Honestly, I'm kinda freaked out at the possibility of sucking that badly in a competition. But there's been so much going on that I didn't get to think about it much and thus didn't freak out much about it. Regardless, can't wait to see Wes' juggling. Thomas', Toby's and Kristian's too. On that note I shall depart and get me some sleep.

Posted by Vova at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

I hate it when people say "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" in relation to things other than hockey, basketball or similar sports. If one follows that logic, you also HIT 100% of the shots you don't take. So really, what they're trying to say is you should take as many "shots" as you can, because there's no penalty for missing them, which oftentimes is not the case in real world. So really, unless you absolutely have to say something that makes no sense, don't say "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" in relation to real life situations.

Posted by Vova at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

So I've been street performing quite a bit lately. This may seem surprising to a lot of you, but I do street perform at the Santa Monica Promenade.

The thing is that with my immigration status I can't legally work, so I decided to get into street performing a little bit ago. My first few weekends of street performing were so horrible, that I think most of my friends didn't think I'd ever be able to make any money doing it. At some points I felt like giving up. It sucks when you try to do something very hard and it's not working. I absolutely HATE that feeling. But I made myself do it every weekend with kind support from Barry and Mark, and every weekend I got a little bit better.

It took me over a month to go from completely sucking and making no money, to feeling pretty good about my street shows and making decent money. I think my street shows are pretty cool. They probably break every single tradition of street performing and end up still working. I pretty much just do some hard juggling, and talk to people about who I am and my juggling. I don't make anything up to be funnier or more interesting. I don't juggle anything dangerous. I just tell everything how it is and do some juggling.

I hear a lot of talk about general public not caring about juggling and only watching shows for comedy and the thrill of seeing something dangerous. That doesn't seem to be very true. It's somewhat true in a sense that if you just go out there and juggle 5 balls or something, people won't care. But if you go out and whip out 7 clubs, people go wild. People seem to really get into juggling, actually, especially if you explain to them what you're doing. They do require a little more explaination than juggling audiences, but after you tell them a little bit more about what you're doing and give them a frame of reference, they seem to appreciate good juggling.

I'm thinking about videotaping some of my street shows and making a DVD out of it. I do some pretty hard juggling in my shows, and I figured some of you guys might like to see that. I haven't decided yet whether or not I'll be doing it, but so far I'm leaning towards doing it. Let me know what you guys think.

Posted by Vova at 08:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

I'm super tired right now, as it's really late and I've had quite a hard day. I can't go to sleep though, because I'm exporting a new video for galchenko.com. That's being launched within the next couple of hours. Mark's in his room finishing it up. You guys better like the video, because a lot of my pain and suffering went into that. Since I'm waiting for the video to export anyway, I thought I'd post on my blog.

First of all I got into this argument with a guy on youtube about "expressing yourself through juggling". I was trying to explain to him how the term "expressing yourself through juggling" didn't make sense to me. I can't imagine anyone expressing themselves through juggling. I've seen jugglers express certain feelings WHILE juggling through acting or movement or some other element of performance. The guy didn't seem to understand my point. So I thought of an analogy. What if I was expressing some emotion while checking email or washing dishes or anything for that matter? Would I then be expressing myself through checking email, washing dishes, etc? I think the guy got the analogy because he messaged back saying he didn't want to argue anymore. Anyone want to argue for him?

I love arguing. I enjoy arguing about most subjects regardless of how meaningless they are. Mark and I have argued about some ridiculously meaningless things.

On a completely unrelated note, where the hell did "w00t" come from? I've seen "w00t" typed as an exclamation. It seems to be synonymous to "yay", though my Russianness may have gotten in the way of understanding that one. The weird thing is that I've never heard it said in a verbal conversation. So I just googled it and it seems like no one really knows where the word came from, but there are a few different theories. Most have to do with gaming and/or computers. But why is it never said in person..? It's a mystery...

Posted by Vova at 01:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)

So the new website is up now. If nothing else, the TIME article made us redo the website. We've had the old one for years and it was horrible, mostly because it was made by me at like 12 or something. Back then I knew even less about web-design than I do now, which is saying a lot, because I still know very little about web-design. Mark Bakalor did the website and I personally think he did a great job. Chad Columbus set up the blogs and also did a great job. Barry Bakalor's hosting it. So thanks Barry, Mark and Chad for the new website.

Posted by Vova at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Well, this is my first blog entry ever. As a matter of fact I'd never thought I would ever even have a blog until about a week or two ago when Olga, Mark, my dad and I agreed it would probably be interesting for a lot of Olga and Vova fans to read our blogs. So I'm going to make entries here when I feel like I have something interesting to say about juggling or anything else really.

Posted by Vova at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (2)